💥 Update Fatigue Is Real—Here’s How to Fix It

We are only three months into the new year, yet this is a pivotal time for many organizations and the execution of their Strategic Plan.

Why?

Well, as I had one COO share with me, “These are the dark days of Objective updates.” 🌝

While this might be a little extreme, there is certainly truth in that statement.

First, for many organizations, especially those in Europe and the United States, we are about to enter the prime spring break season. Folks will be heading off to warmer destinations, spending time with family, and stepping away from work. Those updates that were already starting to lag? They might just quietly slip into the shadows, never to be seen again... 👻

Second, for many employees, this is the time of year where the momentum from the Company Kickoff starts to wear off.

What began as an electrifying vision of a unified direction for the organization has slowly slid back into a siloed view of Objectives, driven by tasks geared towards whatever fires are burning brightest that day.

“These are the dark days of Objective updates.”

Employees that started the year empowered to prioritize their work in a more purposeful way have reverted to saying ‘yes’ to everything that results in the inevitable priority fatigue. 😫

And finally, as the first quarter comes to a close for many organizations, employees are politely pinged by their Managers or HR Leaders reminding them to update their quarterly goals that are tracked in a spreadsheet they can’t find or a tool they only use once a quarter.

Talk about frustrating.

Mix all those ingredients together, and you have a recipe for another year where the execution of your Strategic Plan slowly falls by the wayside.

Who’s to Blame?

As Leaders try to counteract this regression and keep their Strategy top of mind, many try to find the culprit.

The most common reason I hear? The sheer difficulty of getting individuals to proactively provide updates to their Objectives—Objectives that were deemed essential for success just a few months ago.

Leader after leader that I speak to shares that their employees have update fatigue, and they just won’t provide updates to what was agreed upon. They are disinterested in accountability.

Woof.

However, can we really fault employees or teams for this disconnect in providing these updates? And is it fair to say people are disinterested in accountability? That seems like a broad brushstroke.

So instead of pointing fingers, let’s ask: What’s actually driving this fatigue? And more importantly, how do we fix it?

Emphasizing the ‘Why’ Over the ‘How’

There is no silver bullet for addressing all the reasons behind employee’s update fatigue. But there is one area where I see organizations consistently fall short.

From working with hundreds of organizations and seeing thousands of Strategic Plans get rolled out, where I most often see organization’s fall short is in communicating the ‘why’ to employees.

Most organizations are pretty good about delivering the ‘how’.

How to provide an update isn’t something most folks struggle with on a recurring basis.

Yet, if the ‘how’ is so easy and straightforward, then why aren’t employees doing it? 🤔

Well, is it fair for employees to ask us, ‘What’s the point in providing these updates?’

And I pose that question sincerely.

For every Leader sharing that employees aren’t providing updates, those same Leaders also make it known that providing updates should be a non-negotiable.

But it’s fair for employees to ask, ‘Why? Why is it so important for our business?’

So let’s flip that question around. What’s the purpose of employees providing updates weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly? Why should they set aside the time, even if just a few minutes to update their Objectives?

• Is it being reviewed by Leadership?
• Is it being leveraged to remove hurdles blocking them from success?
• Or to provide resources when things are going better than expected?
• Do employees truly see and feel the engagement from Leadership when they provide valuable updates?

Or, do they just feel as though they are punching a timecard, updating KPIs that are required for Board Meetings each quarter, or worse, highlighting challenges that fall on deaf ears because Leadership has changed the Strategy months ago but failed to communicate it to employees.

3 Ways to Help Provide the ‘Why’ to Employees

The best organizations we work with have built in an operating rhythm to their business that highlights the ‘why’ behind employee updates to Objectives and their Strategy.

Further, they have made an intentional effort to highlight that Objective Updates aren’t just one-directional. While employees and even managers aren’t in the room where the information on Objectives might be leveraged, it doesn’t mean it’s one-way traffic.

Part of the communication is clear visibility into when and where the updates are used, as well as how Updates impact decisions or shift direction.

To reinforce that principle, here are a few basics:

🔄 Set and Communicate an Operating Rhythm.

At Elate, we refer to these as rituals, which are the operating cadences in which you review, discuss, and take action on the Strategic Plan you’ve put in motion as an organization.

For more on Rituals, I wrote about them in Edition 36. Clearly communicating Rituals will help employees understand what is being reviewed, when, and how the information provided is being acted upon.

And here is a guide for best practices on building your Operating Rhythm.

👀 Create Cross-Departmental Visibility.

Work shouldn’t be done in siloes, and success isn’t achieved without contributions from multiple areas of the organization.

One of the most frustrating things for any employee is when they are blocked from progressing their Objectives forward because of commitments or blockers from other teams. In particular, this frustration often stems, not from the delay or blocker itself, but the lack of visibility or understanding as to why it’s blocked.

As you build out Objectives and ask for updates, ensure you are doing so in a way where Objectives are connected across departments, so that updates aren’t provided in a vacuum.

🎉 Celebrate the Wins.

This is a core value at Elate, and while there are certainly seasons where we do this better than others, the intent behind Celebrating the Wins is that it places a spotlight on all areas of our Strategy and the execution of it by individuals. Oftentimes wins are only highlighted by sales deals, renewals, or flashy product releases. But there are so many other critical parts to a plan’s overall success. When employees feel as though they are seen regularly in delivering on their part of the organization strategy, then it provides purpose to their work.

The likelihood is that updating a goal in a performance management tool once a quarter or some random spreadsheet each month that they struggle to find isn’t what’s causing update fatigue for your employees.

Again, it isn’t so much ‘how’ our employees provide updates, as it is ‘why’.

At Elate, we believe this starts by shifting an organization’s culture from transactional tasks to purposeful work by ensuring all employees understand how their work is connected to the overall vision for the organization.

Each day that your employees show up to work they are opting into the bigger vision.

We want to help companies reach that shared vision in order to deliver on their ultimate impact.

While it might seem small, by starting with the ‘why’ for employees, you are setting the foundation for your impact to thrive and deliver that ultimate impact.

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